There was a common thread across a few speakers at The Business of Software. That was the idea of software as a social object or social entity.

Hugh McLeod‘s talk focused on this idea of social objects. He defined a geek as a person who communicates via objects.

“Hey man, check out this new cell phone.”

“You have to see my new table saw.”

Bill Buxton touched on his idea of social entities. In his book he further explains “they are social entities. As with people, they have different properties and capacities when viewed as a collective, with a social, and physical context, then they have when they are viewed in isolation, independent of location or context.”

Jennifer Aaker talked about personifying your product or brand. Ie, if your product was a real person, what are the real conversations they would be having with your customers?

Iphone…”You’re cool, wanna come to my party?”

Vista…”Quit bugging, cripes I wish you didn’t have to be here.”

How would your product fair if it turned up at a party?

Bill Buxton spoke at The Business of Software about the use of sketching in the design process. Okay there’s more to it than that but that’s why he spoke for an hour and wrote a book titled Sketching User Experiences.

A quote from his talk, and his book, that I love is that “The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday”.

What the hell does that mean? Get your hot rod up to 88 MPH and head to the future? Well sort of but not quite. Utilize an effective design process in order to ‘visit’ the future. A key for software nerds is that this does NOT mean prototyping. Design is a process separate and distinct from prototyping.

This entry was posted using the gnome based blogging client Drivel. More details here.

Why bother with a blogging client? The main reason for me is drafting posts offline and then being able to easily post them. Typically I write up basic txt files for that purpose, however, that means I have to copy, paste, and edit when I want to actually post. With drivel I can save locally and then post anytime I’m connected.

Just to test it out, this is me editing this existing post with drivel. I was going to add that drivel is clean and simple which are attributes I like in my software. Another nice feature is that if you post to multiple blogs running on varied blog engines then you have a consistent interface for posting.

I arrived at my sister’s in LA yesterday. Due to how silly cheap it was to ship it to a US address, I had my new thinkpad x61 shipped to her place. I cracked it open last night. The x61 is one of the smallest, lightest laptops you’ll find these days. In order to achieve those attributes they abandoned an optical drive. Without a DVD drive, how to you ditch vista and install ubuntu?

The answer was alarming painless to pull off. You follow these instructions and create a bootable USB flash drive with the latest version of ubuntu on it. Yes, this is a nerd post so move on or be prepared.

Maybe I’m new to this but this is cool. I now have a 2GB USB drive with a complete live version of ubuntu that can save it’s state. What’s that mean? It means I can plug that into any pc with a USB port and a BIOS that can boot from USB, restart, and I’m up and running in a full instance of linux running on that flash drive.

The one thing I did differently from those instructions is that I didn’t have a cd copy of ubuntu. Instead I simply downloaded the ISO, extracted it locally and copied the files from there.

Why would you ever do that? Well in my case it allowed me to click the install icon and install ubuntu without a DVD drive. Other things? Get in and retrieve data off corrupt OS’s before you blow them away. Allow people to test drive linux on their machines.

Will I ever make use of this? Actually I have no idea. It’s still cool that you can even do it. Maybe something to demo at the next DemoCampGuelph?

The quick story…I was in San Jose at a local downtown pub when this hit. For those who don’t know how to use links, this was an 5.6 earthquake. Sure it only last about 10 seconds but when the walls and floor are moving like you’re bouncing around in the back of a panel van it seems a bit longer. That was a trip! I decided another pint was in order, then went back to my cozy hotel room on the 16th floor and went to bed. Insanity….

My buddy Mark runs a restaurant here in Guelph named The Cornerstone. I often use him as a real world example of how we should be building applications.

Recently the location two doors down from the cornerstone became available and Mark rented it. Obviously people started asking him what he planned to do in the new space. His answer was that he had no idea. He simply planned to talk to people around the cornerstone and see what they’re looking for.

It isn’t easy but that’s how software should be built. It requires real listening and a true lack of ego to pull of. The reward is that you end up with a business, or software, that people truly need and want.

Where did Mark end up? He’s working on opening a store focusing on handmade local food such as bread, cheese, etc.

Oh lordy I wish I could say I don’t relate to pretty much all of these…

“There’s no way in hell this is going to be under thirty minutes. Why are you lying to me? It’s not possible. You know it’s not possible. You are a liar, sir.”

“You want to rank and hide comments on your “Completely open and honest corporate communications blog,” but only after an admin / editor has approved the comments that have been made? Do you not understand the concepts of “Completely open?” And for that matter, ranking and hiding?”

Were I not an Asteroid I’d be a Pacman apparently.

I am an Asteroid. I am a drifter. I go where life leads, which makes me usually a very calm and content sort of person. That or thoroughly apathetic. Usually I keep on doing whatever I’m doing, and it takes something special to make me change my mind. What Video Game Character Are You?

Dave Winer explains why he doesn’t like facebook or “Why Facebook sucks”. I’m with him on the “Why exactly do I need Facebook to get in between me and my address book?” and he does a good job of explaining it. I don’t use facebook for one-to-one messaging but instead quickly bring conversations back to good old email. Why? Email works, why hand everything over to an app like facebook?

Cooper has a recent article about a design process. What jumps out at me was how many attributes their approach shares with some of the development processes we’ve been using/creating. We use a heavily modified version of scrum for a lot of our projects. The parts that are shared with Cooper? Two to three week deliverables, daily meetings, and embracing and encouraging collaboration over documentation.